‘The Rider,’ starring a real horseman, is a breath of fresh air for Westerns
By Ann Hornaday Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, “The Rider” reinvigorates tropes from the Western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry.
“The Rider” begins with Brady waking from a dream about his favorite old horse to the cold, blue reality of an austere morning: The reflection that meets him is of a horrificgashalongthesideofhis head, held together with staples. Working the rodeo cir- cuit again is out of the question; now Brady must consider a future either training horses or an even more dreaded fate: working a civilian job.
Zhao doesn’t weigh her protagonist down with an overbusy story. She simply follows him as he catches up with friends, banters with his sister and dad, and works with the horses with whom he shares an almost mystical bond. A film composed of elegant shots of endless prai
moonlit firesand rawboned faces, “The Rider” makes the most of silence, finding lyricism in the sound of tinkling wind chimes and rustling grass.
Zhao, who was born in China but spent most of her adult life in the United States, has a deep appreciation for the American vernacular, both visual and spoken. Some of the film’s finest sequences observe Brady and his friends as they swap stories about fallen comrades, as often as not breaking into sweet, mournful song.
When Brady falls in love with a horse named Apollo, both he and the animal seem to take flight, and so does the movie. Seasoned moviegoers will suspect that heartbreak must ensue. It does, but “The Rider” resists cheap emotion and manipulation at every turn.